Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Myths Lies and Damn Lies (Part 1)

1) Link between concessions and
readiness to negotiate.

In fact the opposite applies – when Britain
intervened in the Conflict in Northern
Ireland against the Irish Republican Army it
insisted that in order for negotiations on a peaceful settlement to begin there
must first be a period of calm. This
meant not a single act of violence must be committed by the IRA during this time.
The resulting peace translated into 19
months without any sectarian violence in Northern Ireland before the agenda
for a single meeting was set. Only then
would negotiationsin good faith commence. Israel offered to negotiate if the
Palestinians could guarantee 12 months without violence and then 6 months
without violence and then 2 months …eventually it was reduced to 2 weeks. All these concessions to violence took place
against a backdrop of public pressure by the USA
on Israel
to begin negotiation without any preconditions. Let us be clear that it was Israel that was
told to negotiate without pre-conditions. Eventually, the ‘no violence
clause’ was dropped. There is
a causal link between concessions and violence.

2) Link between settlements and
negotiation.

The only period of progress in the conflict has been during periods
in which expectations were low or non-existent and most important of all, the
Palestinian side had something to lose by not negotiating. If Palestinians
perceived that they were negotiating from strength they became more
belligerent, not less. When Obama extracted 9 months of no settlement
activity from Israel there
was no negotiation between the two sides despite Israel’s acquiescence to the
Presidents (and the Palestinians) demand. The only benefit to either side
was that the Palestinians felt more confident that a long term strategy of
disengagement and violence worked in their favour.

3)Palestinians are victims of aggression.

The Guardian published a table that took past conflicts or
tyrannies and recalibrated their death tolls so their scale could be directly
compared with contemporary events. For instance the death toll in WW2
was 55 million people (it ranges higher amongst some sources). This is
equivalent in 20th century terms to 55 million people. The Middle Eastern Slave trade (controlled by
the Islamic, mostly Arab world between the 7th Century CE and the 19th
CE) cost 18 million deaths which in 20th century terms is 100
million dead. It is the third greatest
(continuous) act of carnage in recorded human history. The Arab Israeli
conflict saw 50,000 deaths between 1950 and the present or between 100,000 and
200,000 deaths between 1881 and 2012.

It is difficult to seriously consider the Palestinians as victims
of ongoing aggression when as Arabs they persecuted both immigrant and
indigenous Jews. This was one of, if not
the driving force behind a desire for
Jewish self-determination. Put simply: Palestinians (Arabs) committed most of the
acts of aggression against Palestinians (Jews) and Palestinians (Arabs) and
Palestinians (not-Arab and not Jewish). If you preach hate and
incite others to violence then you cannot, except within a warped moral
universe, claim to be the victim of aggression when the victim fights back and
historically it is the Jews of Palestine who have been the victims of
aggression who have indeed in less than the last century began to fight back.

4)Islam 632 CE (AD).

Many intelligent people assume that Islam is a faith at least as
old as Hinduism or Judaism. We may take the death of Muhammad in 632 CE
as the date at which Islam became something greater than one man’s personal
empire. Islam may or may not have been
the creation, in the 7th Century CE, of a man named Muhammad. His followers fleshed out the narrative, the
myths and ethos of the faith over the next couple of centuries. But the theological genius was in stating that
Islam preceded all human thought and that Allah was in every man’s soul from
the beginning. Therefore all acts of
creation are Islamic and all acts of destruction either anti-Islamic or Allah’s
punishment to the unworthy infidel. It makes all culture and all civilisation
products of Islamic thought.

This is cultural theft but also highly effective propaganda. It creates the theological justification for
imperialism because the Muslim may take by force what is Islamic by right. Every act of cruelty or deception is mandated
by God. If the Law is the word of God it is unchangeable and as a
consequence cannot be revised. All of
the racism and religious bigotry, all of the calls to ethnic cleansing and
genocide cannot be set aside because they are the unalterable word of
God. But if Islam is no more than ‘a’ rather ‘the’ final phase in human development then logically we should all,
including all the Arabs, become Mormons! (I am sure Mitt Romney would agree
with that one). It is not frivolous. Theology is central to Islamic aggression and
to Arab hostility. Prove one to be
invalid and you remove the justification for almost 1,500 years of Muslim
conquest.

The Arab - Muslim / Liberal – Left propaganda machines have turned the
Arab people into the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine; and all Jews, European (or
American) into interlopers. It may embarrass
African American President Obama as he considers his victory today (and the
start of his second term as President of the most powerful nation on the Earth)
that the ruler of Palestine has told black Jews to ‘go back to where they came
from’ (mainly Ethiopia and the USA). Racism in the Arab world is never
acknowledged but it is fundamental to a world view that places the Arab race above
humanity.

5)Zionism is Racism

Zionism is no more and no less than the right to Jewish self-determination
in the negotiable geographical area delineated by Biblical Israel. Any nationalism will have its extremists. I am British. This does not make me a supporter of Combat 18
or the BNP (the former neo-Nazi, the latter extreme right-wing). Nationalism
is defined simply as identifying a group of people as having the
characteristics of a common group that ties them (either spiritually or
‘physically’)
to a
specific geographical area. Zionism does not have to be specifically
Jewish but it does require Jewish political autonomy. In a theoretical future the possibility of a
non-Jewish majority having control over a Jewish state is not at variance with
the principle of Zionism. The
necessity for a Jewish majority is not a requirement for political control
of Israel
as long as
there is acceptance of a dominant Jewish political identity.